


Obsidian

by Kangofu_CB



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Fae & Fairies, Fantasy, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 13:19:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18447389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kangofu_CB/pseuds/Kangofu_CB
Summary: Fairies give gifts right? All the stories agree that’s true.But fae gifts come with a price - maybe it’s not a one time offer.It’s more like this:  Every time you use that gift you pay a little price.  Clint Barton can see AMAZING things. Not just at a distance.  He sees things other people miss, details and intentions and consequences.  But he can’t hear a thing and his hearing just gets worse. He never misses a shot. But he never comes back from a mission unharmed, either.Funny how those things works.Then there’s Bucky Barnes, who led a life one might almost call charmed, right up until it wasn’t.





	Obsidian

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lissadiane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/gifts).



> For Lissa, who is a wonderful human being. 
> 
> This was supposed to be a birthday gift, then a “sorry you mangled your ankle gift” and now it’s a just because I love you present. 
> 
> You deserve all the best things.

Clint watches Loki come around the corner of the skyscraper farthest away from him on his god-damned alien chariot.  He calculates the angles, the obstacles, the speed of the wind and the target rich environment between him and the alien god and comes to the conclusion that it’s an impossible shot. 

 

Literally impossible, even for someone of his skill. 

 

He closes his eyes, pays the price.  Hears the battle sounds around him get that little bit more muted, that little bit more far away as he draws back on the bow, fixing his target in his mind.  He opens his eyes and releases the arrow.

 

It flies, straight and true, narrowly avoiding multiple aliens and a few allies, skirts the edges of a building, aimed dead center for Loki’s forehead.

 

It ends up clutched in his grasp, with a slimy, smarmy grin behind it, but Loki only has time to enjoy this small victory for a half second before Clint presses the button his bow that detonates the arrowhead in Loki’s face, blasting him off the chariot and leaving him falling towards the streets below.

 

Clint Barton, AKA Hawkeye, never misses. 

 

Sometimes the price of that is worth it.

 

This is one of those times.

 

*

 

Clint’s eyes are blue.  They’re the blue of a bright summer day, clear and guileless, except for when they’re the darker blue of the ocean in a storm, or the pale edges of sunrise.  

 

But they’re blue.

 

His brother’s eyes are brown.

 

His father’s eyes are - were - brown.  His mother’s were green. 

 

Clint’s are blue.

 

An accident of genetics, except no such Punnett square exists.  

 

When Clint had been little he’d asked his mother about it, and she’d laughed and said he must have been kissed by fairies, before she kissed him on the forehead and set him running across the grass.

 

Before her laughter and her smiles and her joy had disappeared under his father’s fists, before the black roiling rage of the man had taken most of Clint’s already-damaged hearing.  He’d been a four year old with a lisp that couldn’t be beaten out of him before the doctors had realized it was hearing loss, not stupidity, that was giving him speech issues. But his sight was a marvel.  Clint could pick out objects as far afield as he could see, against even a monochrome background, with unerring accuracy. When his father was feeling generous, he took Clint hunting with him, let him pick out the prey.  

 

It was the first time Clint ever picked up a bow, but it wasn’t the last.

 

It was never the last time. 

 

Clint could shoot the wings off a fly at a hundred paces.

 

He couldn’t walk without tripping over his own feet.

 

He was a study in contradictions.

 

But every time he hit the squirrel his dad pointed out for him, the scraped knees and twisted ankles he got from climbing out of the tree seemed worth it. 

 

*

 

“Can you adjust my comms?” Clint asks, walking into Tony’s newly-rebuilt lab in bare feet and threadbare sweatpants.  Tony is tinkering with something Clint doesn’t recognize, but that’s hardly unusual. There’s almost never anything in Tony’s lab that Clint  _ does _ recognize. 

 

Tony twirls in the seat and pushes his goggles up onto the top of his head, mussing his already-disastrous hair even further.  “Again?” he asks. “Didn’t I just adjust those before the New Mexico mission?”

 

Clint shrugs.  “I got knocked around pretty hard,” he says, suggesting that’s the cause of the damage without quite saying so.  And he did get knocked around pretty hard - he’s got the bruising and the bandages to prove it, not to mention Natasha knocking him unconscious.  He tugs self-consciously at his ear, where his everyday, purple hearing aids are nestled behind his ears. Those he can adjust on his own, but the comms are a special case. 

 

“Fine, fine,” Tony says, waving at an empty spot on the table.  “Leave ‘em there, I’ll get ‘em back to you as soon as I’m done with this.”

 

Clint leaves the comms where Tony’s said to put them, backing out of the lab cautiously as one of Tony’s many robots comes rolling up with a smoothie that looks like sludge to hand him.  

 

“Thanks,” Clint tells it, lifting the cup to take a cautious sniff.

 

Well, it doesn’t smell any worse than any of the other things he’s eaten in his life, and it smells better than half the stuff he’d put in his mouth when he was in the circus.  He shrugs, tips it up to take a drink.

 

It doesn’t taste as bad as he’d thought it would either. 

 

It’s a weird little family they’re making here, in the tower of a genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist. 

 

**

 

Clint is in Kazakhstan chasing what he’s been realizing are false leads on A.I.M. when the Winter Soldier does his damndest to kill Steve and Natasha.  

 

He can see the battle in his grainy motel room television, watches with his heart in his throat as Natasha takes a bullet to the shoulder, as Steve fights harder than Clint has ever seen him fight, only to come up even, and barely that.

 

Almost- he almost wishes he was there to help.  

 

But wishes are dangerous creatures, when you’ve been kissed by fairies, and so Clint keeps his wishes to himself, even as he books himself the first plane ticket he can get back to the closest city to D.C. that’s open to flights.

 

He gets the all-hands alert that S.H.I.E.L.D is hunting Captain America and Natasha Romanoff as his plane gets grounded in Missouri, and he grinds his teeth in frustration, eventually renting a car and setting off on the highway. 

 

It’s all over before he gets to D.C. of course, the helicarriers in the Potomac, and a new member of the team buzzing around above their heads in prototype wings.  

 

Of course,  _ of course _ , when his skills could have mattered, when he could have made a difference, could have paid Steve back for his trust and his faith, and Natasha for her absolute conviction Clint could be brought back, he’s fucking off out of the country and unavailable.  When his skills, when the price he’s paid for them could have helped, Clint is nowhere to be found.

 

That’s just his shitty luck. 

 

He visits Steve in the hospital, sits with him while he’s unconscious, holds his arms when he’s flailing in his sleep.

 

Steve comes to, once or twice, babbling feverishly and letting Clint soothe him, relaxing at Clint’s familiar face. 

 

He grabs Clint, once, by the shirt, and hauls him in.

 

“It was Bucky,” Steve says, breathless, staring into Clint’s face and trying to force understanding on him.

 

“Who was?” Clint says, instead of arguing.  The nurses have all been cautioning visitors to not feed into Steve’s delirium, to ‘reorient’ him, but Clint’s always said fuck that.  Let the man have his delusions, they’ve got him on the good drugs.

 

“The soldier - he was Bucky,” Steve gasps out, before flopping down on the bed.

 

Clint disentangles Steve’s fingers from his t-shirt and goes to do some digging. 

 

He finds Natasha waiting for him in the database room, a file already in her hand. 

 

“You might not want to pull that thread,” she says, but Clint ignores her, taking the folder with a grim determination.

 

**

 

Clint doesn’t find Bucky Barnes, although he probably comes closer than most, especially since Natasha takes Steve on more than one wild goose chase.  It’s a precaution, partly born to spare Steve pain and partly because they aren’t sure how much Bucky is left in the Winter Soldier and Steve’s made it clear he’s willing to let the other man kill him.

 

It doesn’t matter anyway because Bucky Barnes eventually decides to come in from the cold on his own, while Clint is investigating an abandoned Siberian base.  

 

What he finds there is its own kind of horror, and he’s grateful he spared Steve from it, even as he utterly destroys the chair he finds there and the files contained in the database before he burns the entire facility to the ground. 

 

Clint is entirely unprepared for meeting Bucky Barnes, however, despite knowing he’s at the tower, because in all his years, Clint has only met a handful of people who are like him.  

 

Gifted.

 

Cursed.

 

Depends on which day of the week you ask him. 

 

Either way, Barnes has that same sense of otherness about him that Clint has seen all too often in a mirror, and seldom on another person.  Clint wonders if Barnes can see it too, or if it’s a product of Clint’s special visual perspective. 

 

Barnes nods at him from across the room, an acknowledgement that could mean anything, and Clint notices his eyes are blue.

 

A slate grey sort of blue, deep and clear and haunted, but blue nonetheless.  

 

He wonders what Barnes traded, and what he got in return, but he doesn’t ask.

 

They hover around one another, in a kind of orbit that Clint can’t decide is intentional or not.  Clint walks in the room - Barnes walks out. Barnes is leaving the range as Clint is entering it. 

 

He doesn’t think Barnes is avoiding him, so much as they seem to be like magnets with reverse polarity, hovering around one another but not quite touching.  He wonders if that’s a result of their pasts, their gifts, or a combination of the two. 

 

“Hi,” Clint says.  “I’m Clint. We haven’t met yet.”

 

“Bucky,” Barnes says gruffly, but he doesn’t offer his hand from where its shoved deep in the pocket of a too-big hoodie, and he watches Clint with wide, surprised eyes.

  
Clint offers him a smile, one that says ‘I’m here’ and ‘I see you’ and ‘We’re not enemies’.  Or at least, that’s what he hopes it says. It’d be nice to have someone who understood, a bit, what it’s like to be Clint.

 

And they’ve got that whole brainwashing thing in common too, so there’s that.

 

Barnes avoids him a little less after that, but he doesn’t go out of his way to be friendly either.  They share a bucket of popcorn during movie night, and their range times overlap a bit, but not much else changes.  He catches Barnes watching him, sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, and Clint lets him look.

 

Natasha is observing them with narrowed eyes, though, and Clint-

 

Clint takes a mission in the DRC that pulls him out of the tower for months and brings him back on a stretcher, barely hanging on to consciousness. 

 

He hadn’t missed his shot though, and the man responsible for kidnapping girls throughout the area is dead with an arrow in his eye.  

 

**

 

Clint wakes up.

 

Clint usually wakes up, but this time he wakes up unexpectedly -- painfully -- in the medical suites, intensely aware of the presence of an unfamiliar person. 

 

Barnes is sitting in a chair across the room, his eyes fixated on Clint.  

 

“Hi,” Clint says, his voice hoarse and throat dry.  “What’s a nice place like this doin’ in a boy like you?”

 

He gets a snort in response.  Barnes doesn’t say anything in response, but he does bring Clint a glass of water and ice and lets him have small sips, that are, quite frankly, the best thing Clint’s ever tasted in his life. 

 

“You’re always gettin’ hurt,” Barnes says, after a little bit, just as Clint is starting to drift back off, after he’s pushed the button the nurse oh-so-helpfully handed him earlier.  

 

“Yeah,” Clint sighs.  “I am.”

 

“Seems like you ought to be able to avoid that.”

 

Clint turns his head on the pillow to find Barnes giving him a shrewd look.  “You’d think,” he agrees. “Bein’ a secret agent and all.”

 

The sound Barnes makes could almost be a laugh, if Clint were being generous.  “I hear you never miss.”

 

“Nope,” Clint lets the ‘P’ pop like gum as the morphine sinks into his veins and makes everything seem just hazy enough to be tolerable.  “Can you take my aids out?” he asks, after a second. His left arm is wrapped from just above the elbow to the fingertips in a cast, and he’s got his button clenched in his right fist so he doesn’t accidentally forget to push it again. 

 

Barnes leans over him in the bed that’s trying hard to pretend it’s not a hospital bed and failing miserably, and gently unhooks the comms that double as aids when Clint’s in the field.  

 

It’s easier to talk about this when Clint can’t hear the responses. 

 

“My mom was real sick before I was born,” Clint says, around a yawn.  The morphine helps with confessions too. “Doc told her I probably wouldn’t make it, and if I did, I’d likely be blind and mute and a whole host of other things.  I dunno. So she made a deal.” Clint lets his eyes drift closed on the fuzzy corners of the world. “I can see real good,” he adds, after a minute. “Can shoot real good too, not sure what that’s about.  But I can’t hear shit, and I never go a single mission without a new injury.”

 

He pauses for a long time, almost long enough to drift off into sleep.

 

“Everything has a price.”

 

When he wakes up, Barnes is gone, but there are periwinkles sitting by his aids on the bedside table.

 

**

 

The mission is a shitshow, and Steve takes three gunshots to the gut.  He’s gonna be fine, but it would be nice if he’d use the shield to, you know, shield himself once in a while. 

 

Clint finds Barnes on the roof, the wind from being so many stories up whipping his hair out of its less than stylish man-bun and into his face as he stares blankly into nothing. Clint passes over the bottle of booze he’s procured from Natasha’s stash as he sits on the edge next to him, their feet dangling into the abyss.

 

Barnes cracks the cap and takes a long, measured swallow from the bottle, not even grimacing as it goes down. 

 

Clint’s impressed.  

 

He holds his hand out and Barnes passes the bottle back so that Clint can take his own drink out of it, and then he hands it over, reaching for the six pack he’s brought as well and popping the first can. 

 

“So,” he says, later, when three beers are gone along with half the bottle of vodka, mostly courtesy of Barnes.  “You wanna talk about it?”

 

“Nope,” Barnes says, popping the ‘P’ the same way Clint had all those weeks ago in medical.

 

Clint lets the silence settle again for a while, for another beer and another shot, and then he asks the question he’s been wondering about for months.  “What’d you trade?”

 

Barnes makes a sound that’s somewhere between amused and painful.  “Everything.”

 

Clint hums thoughtfully.  “What’d you ask for?”

 

“His life.”  The second work cracks somewhere in the middle, and Clint leans heavily into Barnes’ shoulder.

 

Barnes leans back.  

 

Seventy years of Hydra fuckery is just about a lifetime, Clint figures.  Seventy years on the ice is the same. 

 

“He’s gonna be fine,” Clint says, just in case Bucky - and somewhere in here, he’s become Bucky - needs to hear it again.  

 

It must have been a long time ago, Clint figures.  Before the serum, before the war. Maybe one of the Brooklyn winters that Steve talks about, jokes about, one of the times he’d gotten the last rites.  Steve’s mother had been Irish, Clint remembers, and Bucky-

 

He’s not sure about Bucky’s family, now that he thinks of it, but he bets Sarah Rogers had known a thing or two about the fae folk.  

 

He wonders what Steve and Bucky had been to each other then, wonders what they are to each other now.

 

They sit on the roof in companionable silence until the vodka and beer are gone and the sun is long since set.  When Bucky stands up, he offers Clint a hand and a look, something that falls somewhere between an apology and a thank you.  Clint gives a jerk of the chin that’s meant to mean anytime. They go their separate ways at the elevator, but Clint can feel Bucky’s eyes on him as the doors close between them, and he wonders a lot of things.

 

**

 

It’s Clint’s turn to take a bullet, next mission.  

 

He hadn’t even asked for it this time.  Just seen a blur of motion in the woods, just enough warning to shove Natasha out of the way, and then feel a searing pain across his thigh.  

 

A flesh wound, mostly.  

 

Bucky is pacing medical before Clint even arrives, limping on Steve’s shoulder and ignoring Nat’s cool glare.  

 

She would never forgive him for not letting her take her own bullets, as if Clint has ever been capable of doing anything but take a bullet for her.  It’s not sexism, it’s just family, but she takes it kinda personal. 

 

“I’m fine,” Clint says, before he’s even settled on the exam table.  “‘Tis but a flesh wound.”

 

“You think you’re funny,” Bucky growls, “but you’re really not.”

 

“I’m a delight,” Clint assures him, already stripping out of his suit.  The leg needs stitches, and the fucking thing doesn’t come in two pieces.  It’s the whole suit on and the whole suit off. What a pain in the ass. He makes a mental note to mention it to Tony. 

 

It’s Bucky’s large, capable hands that are helping ease the suit over his wounded thigh, though, and when Clint looks up, both Steve and Natasha have vacated the premises.  Which is weird, because Nat usually never misses an opportunity to lord herself over him when he’s got hurt on a mission, and she’s certainly never missed an opportunity to swear at him when he’s taken an unnecessary risk on her behalf. 

 

“Huh,” Clint says, looking around.  He shrugs it off. He’s dodged one bullet then, he guesses.  

 

“Is it worth it?” Bucky grinds out, looking anywhere but Clint’s face, a faint blush riding high on his cheeks. 

 

“What?” Clint asks, but he already knows. 

 

“Any of it.”

 

Clint thinks about it, makes a little sound in the back of his throat as he considers.  “Mostly,” he says, finally. “I used to be a lot more careless.”

 

Bucky gives him a look of frank disbelief, glancing down at the sticky blood still oozing sluggishly from Clint’s thigh.  

 

Clint shrugs.  “That’s just pure dumb luck.”

 

Bucky rolls his eyes.

 

“What about you?” Clint quietly asks, eyeing Bucky.  “Was it worth it?”

 

“I don’t know,” Bucky admits, after a long and painful silence.  

 

The doctor comes in before Clint can get much more than that out of him, and Bucky leaves before the last of the stitches are in place.  Natasha comes to collect him before he can sneak out, and he listens to her lecture him in blistering Russian all the way to his room, where he collapses face down on his mattress and dreams of storm-blue eyes and cold rain showers.  

 

**

 

No-one gets hurt for a while after that.  Clint’s skills aren’t needed by Fury, and Steve manages to not get himself shot for long enough that the tension leaves Bucky’s face and shoulders, and movie nights are a regular occurrence again.  

 

There are more buckets of popcorn and there is shared time on the range and there is a growing awareness that their magnetic orbit is less polarized with every passing day.  

 

Bucky starts turning up on Clint’s floor on nights he can’t sleep, and there are movie marathons on opposite ends of the couch where they wake up with tangled legs and cricks in their necks, and Natasha’s gaze gets less narrow and more thoughtful when she looks at them. 

 

“You and Barnes are getting along,” she observes one day, when she and Clint are sparring and she’s looking to cause a distraction.

 

“Yeah,” he grunts, blocking the punch she aims for his ribs but missing the sweep of her leg at his ankles.  He goes down in a less-than graceful slump, but manages to roll before she can land on him with a pointed elbow.  “He’s alright.”

 

She makes a sound that is almost breathless agreement, and Clint feels a moment of triumph, just before she makes a running leap and wraps her thighs around his throat and wrestles him to the ground.  

 

“Don’t get hurt,” she advises, as he lays there, wheezing.  

 

“Too late,” he calls to her back.  “Pretty sure you just crushed my trachea!”

 

“You’re fine.”  The voice is unexpected, but not unwelcome.  Bucky materializes into Clint’s line of sight, and Clint is frankly impressed that he’s made his way into the training room unnoticed at all, but then, he’d been pretty focused on Natasha for the last hour or so.  

 

Clint holds his arms up feebly, and Bucky hauls him to his feet without complaint, though he does look a little fondly exasperated. Bucky’s hand comes up to Clint’s face and his thumb grazes across a place on his cheekbone where Clint is certain a bruise is already starting to form.  

 

“I gave as good as I got,” Clint assures him.

 

“I know.”  Bucky’s voice has a timber Clint hasn’t quite heard in it before, and he’s staring into Bucky’s eyes and still wondering all the same things he’s wondered before.

 

But Bucky’s hand falls and he takes a step back, out of Clint’s personal space.  

 

“You wanna go?” he asks, and Clint’s smile turns a little sharp, a little feral.

 

They add sparring to their repertoire, and if Clint’s hands wander a little more than they do when he spars with Natasha, well, Bucky’s seem to do the same.  

 

**

 

Bucky never does decide he wants to go on missions.  Clint can see him thinking about it sometimes, when the call to assemble comes and everyone goes out except him.  He can see it when they all come back, sometimes battered and bruised but always victorious, and he’s checking Clint and Steve over for injuries in equal measures. 

 

But he never offers, and Clint never asks. 

 

Steve does, but Bucky just shakes his head, and takes a step back.

 

It lasts, until it doesn’t.  

 

Until Clint takes a shot to the shoulder that means he’s out of commission for months, and the team is down a sniper, and Bucky says he’ll go, worried grey-blue eyes looking Clint over when he says it.  Clint opens his mouth to say -- something. He’s not sure what, but then closes it with a snap when Bucky’s lips press into a thin, firm line. 

 

It’s Bucky’s choice.

 

He hasn’t had many. 

 

So Clint keeps his mouth shut and Bucky takes his place on the team.

 

For a little while, it’s Clint’s turn to watch them come back, battered, and bruised, and victorious.  Bucky isn’t better -- or worse -- than Clint has ever been. They’ve known they were about equally matched on the range now for a while.  And Bucky brings a whole new kind of fight to the ground, one that Clint can’t hope to compete with, especially when he’s back-to-back with Steve.  

 

Clint doesn’t ask if it was worth it, anymore. 

 

Something about Bucky seems lighter, somehow, in a way that makes him unsure he wants to know the answer. 

 

So Clint heals, and he watches the team come back, and he checks Bucky over for injuries that heal almost as he’s looking at them, and now he wonders different things. 

 

He thinks about a farmhouse in Iowa, and a one-eyed dog, and the fact that he’s been doing this for a long, long time.  

 

Wonders if it’s still worth it for him.  

 

Bucky doesn’t ask.  

 

**

 

Bucky doesn’t ask until he finds Clint in the shooting range, testing out a practice bow with a draw that’s more sensible for the injury he’s recovering from, but which Clint has pulled until he’s sweating and shaking with it and still unable to let go of the nightmare that had pulled him out of bed and down to the familiar comfort of a bow in his hands and a target to focus on. 

 

He takes the bow out of Clint’s hands, carefully, gently, and rubs the tension he finds there with tender fingers. 

 

“Alright?” he asks, when the shaking has subsided and the sweat has cooled on Clint’s skin.

 

“Mostly,” Clint says, even though it’s not quite true. 

 

“Ask me again,” Bucky says, stepping in close and settling a hand on Clint’s jaw.

 

“Was it worth it?” Clint asks, again, and waits for the answer. 

 

“To be here? Now?”

 

Clint nods, his mouth dry and his heart pounding. 

 

Bucky leans in, careful, so, so careful.  “Yeah,” Bucky breathes, so close that Clint can feel the words on his skin, and it makes him shiver.  “Yeah, it was worth it.”

 

The kiss is so soft it’s barely there -- Clint wonders, distantly, if this is what it’s like to be kissed by fairies -- until he leans into it, warm and welcoming and  _ here _ , and Bucky’s arms go around him, one cradling the back of his head and the other around his waist, as Clint’s wrap around his shoulders and they lean against one another, solid and sure.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Clara who encouraged this, Spidergwenstefani who graciously beta read it on zero notice, and the Bad Decision Buddies discord who sprinted with me until it was done. Y’all are all wonderful!!!


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